Before the Press Release: What We See in Hosting M&A

Many of the owners who ask what their hosting business is worth have not decided to sell. Some want a number before they think about anything else. Some want to know whether a serious buyer exists for a company like theirs, and treat the answer as information rather than a commitment. Some already intend to sell and want a process run. Each of them is part of the activity behind the public M&A market, and from outside little of it can be seen. What becomes visible is the deal announcement, and in the first half of 2026 we counted thirty of those across hosting, domains and infrastructure.

Our own work over the past twelve months gives us a view of what happens before that announcement. In that time we have worked on more than thirty M&A transactions and active processes, all in the same three segments. That is a different measure from the thirty public announcements, because some of what we see is still under discussion, in diligence or in negotiation rather than signed. Behind it sits a network of more than three hundred active buyers, many of whom have told us what they are looking for. The public count and our own figures measure different things over different periods and are not meant to be compared. What they show together is how much of the market exists before anything appears in a public deal count.

What the Public Deals Show

The announced transactions do reveal what kinds of buyers are active. At the top end, Com Laude’s acquisition of Markmonitor, closed on the last day of 2025 and announced as complete in January, brought two corporate domain registrars together under one group with a stated initial enterprise value of around 450 million dollars. That is scale being assembled in a specialist segment. The combined group says its client base includes most of America’s twenty largest enterprises.

Further down the market the pattern looks different. HostPapa, based in Burlington, Ontario, completed two acquisitions in quick succession in April: Tailor Made Servers, a Dallas dedicated-server provider, and Hostwinds, a Seattle host founded in 2010 with data centers in Seattle, Dallas and Amsterdam. Jamie Opalchuk, HostPapa’s founder and chief executive, described the Hostwinds deal as advancing an ambition to be “the most trusted hosting partner for SMBs, developers, and resellers globally” and giving the company “a deeper, broader offering across every tier of the hosting stack.” Read together, the two purchases look like a repeat buyer adding infrastructure and geographic reach at the same time. Neither release put a value on its deal.

And some deals are not for companies at all. In May, HOSTAFRICA acquired the hosting division of Evoweb, a business line rather than a business, and later that month acquired the application hosting platform Zanode. Buyers in this market are often after a particular customer base, a particular capability or a particular piece of infrastructure, and a division can be a cleaner purchase than the whole company around it.

How Buyers Narrow the Field

If the owner’s side of the private market is a question, the buyer’s side is a specification. Buyers arrive with more precision than the phrase “actively looking” suggests. They tend to specify a geography, a revenue range, a margin floor, the share of revenue that recurs, the technology a target runs on, how concentrated its customer base is, and what the acquisition has to do for them strategically. A buyer with a shared-hosting base in one country and a plan to add managed WordPress in another is not looking for hosting companies in general. It is looking for one particular shape of company.

That is why three hundred buyers does not mean three hundred buyers for any given seller. Apply geography and the list shrinks. Apply a revenue band and it shrinks again. Add EBITDA, recurring revenue, customer concentration, platform and strategic fit, and a network of hundreds narrows to a short list of buyers for whom one particular business makes sense. A large network is useful because that short list is different for every seller, not because every seller can expect hundreds of approaches.

The current volume has had one practical consequence on our side. We now take on new sell-side mandates only from companies with annual revenue above two million US dollars or two million euros, so that the processes already under way get the attention they need.

None of this means every hosting company has a buyer waiting. What we are seeing now is more activity ahead of the announcement: more owners asking what their business is worth, more buyers with a defined target in mind, and more of those conversations turning into live processes. Much of that happens in private, and by the time a deal reaches a press release, the part of the story that decided it is already over.

About the Data

The thirty public deals come from our own tracking of hosting, domain and infrastructure deals announced, or announced as completed, between January and June 2026. The more than thirty transactions and active processes, the buyer network and the mandate threshold are our own figures as of September 2026. The figure of more than thirty transactions and active processes is not a count of completed acquisitions. Details of the example transactions come from the companies’ own announcements. Readings of what those deals show about buyer behavior are ours.